Is Narconon Safe?Inappropriate treatment

Last updated
5 November 2002

A significant problem identified by the State of Oklahoma's
investigative team in 1991 was the use of Narconon's own clients in the delivery
of the Narconon programme:

Narconon permits clients under treatment for drug and
alcohol abuse to handle and provide medications to fellow Narconon clients,
to supervise the sauna treatment of fellow Narconon clients, and to supervise
Narconon clients with psychiatric disorders. Such practices endanger the
client's health and safety and are not in accord with acceptable drug and
alcohol treatment.

Part of the Narconon treatment
program involves touch assists between patients. Touch assists involve massages
between patients in rooms by themselves. Narconon has both male and female
patients who are involved in the drug and alcohol rehabilitation program.
This practice of touch assists could likely lead to improper sexual contact
between drug addicts or alcoholics in the process of recovery. An accepted
standard in such programs is for the patients to keep their hands to themselves.
The practice of touch assists between male and female patients who are recovering
drug addicts or alcoholics in private rooms renders the program unsafe in
this respect. ["Findings
of Fact regarding the Narconon-Chilocco Application For Certification by
the Board of Mental Health", State of Oklahoma, 13 December 1991]

This is, in fact, a standard Scientology practice which
in its Scientology context is known as "co-auditing", where two
trainee Scientologists cooperate in "auditing" each other. Significantly,
it is also used in Scientology's own drug rehabilitation course:

[T]wo people pair up and work with each other on
drills ... on a co-audit, meaning cooperative auditing, basis. (Auditing
is the application of Scientology processes to another for his benefit.)
Students study, drill and then audit many different processes on each other,
helping another and being helped in return to become more in present time
and oriented to the environment, all of which can greatly raise a person’s
potential for success.["Answers to Drugs" - <http://www.scientologyhandbook.org/sh7_3.htm>]

This provides another illustration of how Narconon's practices
are informed more by Scientology's beliefs than by recognised practice in
dealing with addiction.

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